The Broken Dreams
by Kipper Snack
Summary: Rhyme is feeling down. In a weird lapse of his modus operandi, Joshua tries to cheer her up. That seemingly simple task turns out to be a bit more than he bargained for...
1. Rhyme is a Total Failure at CPR

_**THE BROKEN DREAMS**_

CHAPTER ONE: IN WHICH JOSHUA AND RHYME DISCUSS ITCHY ORIFICES

Disclaimer: This story is something of the culmination of "The Slowing Down" and "The Reckless Charging," both of which are like, parallel universes to this story or something. You can read those if you want, but you don't have to in order to understand this.

Rating: T for Language I Guess

Genre: Friendship, Romance...?

Pairing: Possible Joshyme I guess... I feel like a tool for saying "possible."

OF NOTE IN THIS CHAPTER: Joshua spills his coffee, Rhyme does her homework

* * *

><p>Another day, yet another boring afternoon.<p>

WildKat was quiet, a welcome relief from the world of Players, Noise, and Reapers outside. It was because of this that the Composer of Shibuya came here to stink up the homey atmosphere with his black aura.

Yoshiya Kiryu, known to all as Joshua, leaned back in his chair, casually draping his arms over the glossy, orange plastic as he stared aimlessly out the window. His hair wasn't brushed and his shirt looked kind of stale, but he clearly didn't give a rip. Hygiene was a tertiary concern at best when one was an animated corpse dwelling in a sewer. Normally, Joshua tried to keep himself looking fine and dandy, like one of those douchebag Dragon Couture models made flesh, but today was a Saturday. Perhaps it was due to Weekenditis, perhaps it had to do with with the alignment of the celestial bodies, perhaps it was written in the stars that today would be a lazy day; whatever the case, he found he just couldn't be assed to care.

In truth, his slightly-rumpled appearance was due to the fact that he'd had a late night and overslept. He'd only just woken up about an hour ago, actually, and was now enjoying a light breakfast of coffee and mint tea cake scone sandwiches (his latest culinary experiment) at three in the afternoon. What in the world had kept him up all night, you ask – watching StarCraft Tournaments? Twenty-four-hour, non-stop Evangelion marathon? Playing goofy lucid dreaming games until deep into the unholy clasp of the witching hour?

Actually, none of the above. Truthfully, he'd been hunting the straggler Taboo Noise and basically beating the crap out of them for hours on end, equipped with naught but a cell phone and a shadow. The task was arduous, and it really drained the physical energies, but it was crucial – another Game couldn't start until all the rogue sub-demons had been thoroughly scrubbed from the UnderGround. And, as the Composer, it was really his job to take care of the nasty little pests. Josh's attitude towards this particular duty could essentially be summed up in three words: _Buuuuhhh whatever uuuuugh._

The Taboo Noise also had a nasty side-affect: they leeched his energy. Every hit from monochromatic tattoo-claws seemed to take more out of him than with the usual Noise, and while this didn't amount to much over short-term periods, the little bit extra added up. On top of this, he had just reset Shibuya barely a week ago, which always left him weak for a few days. Given how worn-out he felt, it wasn't a huge surprise that he was sleeping a lot lately, really – but he'd be back to normal power in a few days' time.

The cafe was an excellent place to start the day, be it morning or afternoon. The trendy decorations had been carefully picked to exemplify modern style and slathered with a buttload of Imprinting so that they basically pounded the sense of comfort into your brain, driving a railroad spike composed of homeyness into your eye. A possible plus: the tables and chairs were all the same enamel-coated orange, which just so happened to be Joshua's favorite color. You will recall a certain math fetishist had basically barged in and thrown a level-i tantrum, trashing the entire cafe beyond recognition. Well, about a week or two ago, Mr. H had finally fixed the place up, which basically amounted to slapping plaster over the holes in the drywall and then spraying obnoxiously-bright graffiti everywhere to cover the evidence. (Neku loved it, predictably enough, but Joshua was just glad the fan was back in operation – the paint fumes gave him a headache.) Speaking of Mr. H, he was bumping around in the kitchen somewhere.

Josh had his elbows propped on the table surface, head turned very firmly to the right. WildKat's windows were huge, great sheets of glass that stretched from floor to ceiling, and they let in a lot of light, bringing an airy, lofty quality to the cafe. They also gave the Composer an excellent view of Cat Street and the Shibuya skyline. All in all, they were optimal things to stare through aimlessly, and they served him well. Because... well, they're _windows_. That's kind of what they're there _for_.

There were a few people wandering around on the sidewalk outside, all of them rather mundane-looking (well, by Shibuya's standards, anyway). One person appeared to have dropped something of great importance down a sewer grate and was, as a consequence, totally freaking the fuck out.

Joshua snickered. _What a dork. _Schadenfreude blossomed in his cold, undead guts, filling him to the brim with warm fuzzies.

Presently, Mr. Hanekoma sauntered from the kitchen, squeezed out from behind the counter and approached Joshua, hands behind his back. "...So, J. I was thinking."

"That's highly unusual."

Mr. Hanekoma deftly kicked the chair out from under Joshua's smug little ass, sending him crashing to the ground. "AS I WAS SAYING." He waited politely as Josh peeled himself off the dirty floor and, indignant, flopped back in his seat. "Guess what, boss? Ever since Phones converted to Earmuffs, I've been getting more n' more customers for some reason."

"Why? The food is egregious." Donuts? Muffins? Pfeh! How very _Boeotian_. Joshua only had taste buds for parasitic mind-controlling fungus.

"I think it's got somethin' to do with the way your horrible personality sucked all the bad outta his, and in so doing made him into your average sunshine burger. He's got a buncha friends now, J, and they all hang around in a cutesy lil' passle, you know?" Mr. H leaned forward casually, bracing his knobby hands on the edge of Joshua's table. With an almost misty look in his eyes, he sighed fondly. "He always comes here for his coffee, bless his lil' heart. And his friends, they follow him like ducklings. It's so _cute_."

"My personality isn't horrible," said Joshua.

"Huh? Aight, aight, whatever you say, boss. Point is, you've made him a regular Boy Scout. You should be proud 'a yerself."

"I think my personality is _just fine_, thank you."

"In actual fact..." Ignoring Joshua completely, Mr. H continued his little speech with notes of uncertainty. "...for the first time since I opened up this junky place six years ago...the food display case is empty."

Joshua nodded solemnly in recognition of this important milestone - and went right back to brooding over his people issues.

The look on Mr. H's face at that moment changed to one of slight discomfort. "Why...it's _so_ empty, I...I think I'm gonna have to pop on over to the grocery store for a few minutes."

Hold the phone! Now THAT was different. Joshua's ears perked up immediately. Of course, Mr. H was always doing some sort of errand, but... he _never_ bought food. In fact, Joshua didn't even know what Mr. H was _doing_ half the time – but whatever it was, it sure didn't involve buying Joshua tasty stuff. You wouldn't find Mr. H lovingly buttering Joshua's toast in the morning, or bringing him bags of postmodernist pancakes in bed, or even making him a cold, slimy glass of cream cheese tea. No, no, no. If Joshua wanted to stuff his face with something, he was on his own. (To paraphrase the Producer himself: "I will in no way be aiding your degeneration into an Eloi, J. I think you can handle a five-meter journey to the nearest vending machine.")

Joshua's interest was piqued, anyhow. Mr. H hated grocery shopping for some reason, preferring to construct his muffin sets out of strategically-folded napkins.

"So, um, J. Do ya think you can watch the cafe for a sec while I'm gone? It won't be THAT long."

The cream puff blinked slowly, uncomprehending. "...Me? Watch the cafe?"

"Pff, yeah. You're a big boy now, aren'cha?"

"I'm the Composer," Joshua sniffed. "I believe I qualify for the position of 'big boy.'"

Mr. Hanekoma reached down and ruffled the big boy's fluffy hair fondly, an action that was met with a "neh" of disapproval. "That's what I like to hear. And, here–" Mr. H pulled out the thing he'd been hiding behind his back. "A java chip frappuccino, for my fav'rite lil' bosserino."

"If you're going to kiss my ass, the least you could do is shave," Joshua remarked, but he accepted the cold drink eagerly.

"Ha, ha! Be good?"

"If I must."

Mr. H paused. "Oh! Wait, before I go – make sure you put on the Employee Outfit, 'k?"

Joshua groaned. "Oh, come on. Do I have to?"

"Yeah."

After a series of horrible faces and accusations of shota torture fetishes, Joshua hauled himself out of his chair and hobbled off into the backroom with the enthusiasm of an eighty-year-old man stricken with the bubonic plague.

He dragged himself back a moment later, fully garbed in the Official Employee Outfit of WildKat. Basically, it was a miniature version of Mr. H's own signature clothes, complete with sunglasses... with the unwelcome addition of a really unfashionable-looking apron that said SUBOORDINATE in violently-pink block letters. Natch. Joshua had personalized it already, tying his gorgeous hair back with a little hair bandy thing so that he had a dorky little ponytail sprouting off the top of his head – an attempt at masking his identity, perhaps? Whatever the case, he looked ridiculous. And therefore cute, which was rather degrading - in Joshua's esteemed opinion, at least.

"Aww..." Mr. H gushed. "I shall call him... Mini-Me."

"Can it," Joshua snapped, an excessively-warm deluge of ectoplasm throbbing through the cold capillaries of his undead cheeks. His ears were bright pink.

Mr. H laughed his lady-killing laugh and waved good-bye, breezing out through the front door. Joshua was left alone to wallow in his misery.

"Like there are going to be customers anyway," Joshua sniffed darkly. "Bah humbug!"

He sighed, walked over and fell back into his chair. Picking up the frappucino with a ginger touch, he slurped away his unnecessary and illegitimate angst with a monsoon of sugary sweetness. Joshua summoned a spoon from behind the counter and used it to swirl the whipped cream into the rest of the deliciously unhealthy brew, a tiny smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. Ahh, these stupid frappuccinos were nothing short of paradise...

He took a casual bite of his mint tea cake scone sandwich and instantly regretted it with all of his being. Eyes watering in distress, the poor child slammed down half of his coffee in a vain attempt to burn away the hideous flavor from his oral tissues, but the coffee seemed to react chemically with the hideous stuff, and in so doing generated an even _worse_ sensation that spread horrified chills through his body. "_Bluh_–_!_" A cold sweat began to prick at his lower back. Panicking, he grabbed a wad of napkins and resorted to removing the flavor manually via frantic scrubbing motions.

And, as luck would have it, it was at this most unfortunate of times that someone else entered WildKat.

_Whaaat?_ An actual customer? _Now?_

_No... not now! Not like this!_ Joshua almost crammed the wad napkins down his throat in shame. _ABORT MISSION ABORT ABORT ABORT_–

The approaching challenger didn't pay any attention to the gagging miracle boy in the corner. Rather, she seemed to be fixated on the immediate air below her nose – she dragged her feet ever-so-slightly, each shuffling step seeming almost like an effort. A gust of cold air spilled in from the outside world, and so it seemed that as she walked in the temperature in the room plummeted a good ten degrees.  
>Joshua managed to hastily cram the spit-covered napkins into his pants pocket and sloppily rearrange himself into a nonchalant position. (For those of you keeping score at home, why yes, Yoshiya Kiryu was indeed the very definition of 'smooth operator.') His mouth still burned with disgust – in hindsight, perhaps cementing the scone and cake to the sandwich bread with crimson chili hadn't been the best of ideas – but he kept his jaw clamped shut, lest an agonized whimper somehow escape and shatter his bastardly image. Even so, he shed a single, glittering tear.<p>

With a calculated flick of the hair, Josh swept his eyes over the newcomer, trying to casually determine if his cover was blown.

She was short, blonde, and kind of scruffy-looking; her chunky skater shoes were well-worn and slightly tattered in places, and her Wild Boar clothes looked a few sizes too big for her tiny body. As a proponent of slightly-oversized clothing himself, Joshua could only give this last detail his stamp of approval. However, clearly she was well off, a true Shibuya-grown child – the crown of her head was jammed into a signature Gatito cap, and a limited-edition, hyper-rare bell pendant jingled around her slender neck. She also had this sweet red bookbag in her hand. If she noticed the spectacular crisis Joshua was going through, she paid it no mind. Classy, or just completely oblivious?

And so she staggered up to a table in the far corner, hooded eyes fixated on her feet, and plonked her knapsack on the floor. With a slightly-grumpy sigh, she collapsed into a chair and proceeded to rub her temples for a good, solid minute.

Joshua breathed a small sight of relief, venting it through his nose so that it came out as an arrogant scoff. Confidence cradled his palpitating heart once again in its sturdy hands, and he sipped his coffee smugly. _Awww yeah, Josh. You still got it__._ The tiny coffee spoon sank down a little in the thick drink, nearly vanishing under the surface.

After a moment's hesitation, he chanced another look at the girl – she seemed oddly familiar, somehow.

...Oh, right. She was the delinquent Reaper's pet gerbil. Er, squirrel. ...Sister. Yeah. That was right, wasn't it? (He hadn't exactly seen her before – at least, not conscious and loose on the streets.) Nnnnnnneh, it didn't really matter. She was just another face to him, but...

Something about her seemed a little... _off_. He drummed his fingers on the tabletop lightly, frowning a little. If memory served, Gerbil-girl here had been largely defined by her optimistic, upbeat attitude. The adorable, bubbly, sugar-sweet Polly Saccharide of the group, friend to all living creatures and Sailor Earth or something. However, this assumption was clearly utter fallacy, given her current state. She looked more like a world-weary young woman, honestly; like she had some great weight locked in her bones and had to lug it around all day, and only now could she rest in piece. Seriously, if her soul was music right now, it'd sound like a funeral dirge.

Well, knowing young girls, Joshua brushed it off, assuming her apparent depression was a simple mortal issue magnified long past its scope by the influence of puberty hormones. No doubt, it was probably something like an upcoming math test, conflicting club schedules, boy trouble...

He pictured this tiny little girl being cradled in the meaty palm of some super-beefy douchebag. _'Ooh, Higashizawa-sama~~~~!'_

The idea was so ridiculous it forced a choked snicker from his throat, one that curled his dead lips into the tiniest of tinysmiles. Then he realized his pathos was showing, and so he drowned his grin in a huge, disproportionately-enthusiastic swill of frappucino. A handy tip: never chug freezing cold drinks full of bullet-sized chocolate chips, or you'll wind up a choking mess like he did.

Gerbil-girl started at the sudden racket. She whipped around, concern stirring in dull blue eyes. "...Oh, sir... Sir! A-Are you okay?"

"(hack hack spit)"

She took a tentative step forward, her expression slightly worried. Something seemed to click in her eyes – she quickly slapped on her game face and dashed to his aid. "Hold on, s-sir! I know CPR! Everything will be okay... I, uh, I think!"

She kicked his chair out from under him – he came crashing to earth disgracefully for the second time that afternoon – but she caught him, throwing her tiny arms around his flabby torso like a lariat. Staggering back a little, she nearly collapsed with the sudden excess weight. In a rare lucky break for poor Joshua, she managed to stabilize before they both wound up dining at WildKoncussion.  
>Break time was over only seconds later, though - the girl proceeded to impact her combined fists into his poor, suffering diaphragm with violent stabbing motions.<p>

Joshua tried to salvage what was left of his dignity and shove her off, but he was weak and his vision was basically buried under a fountain of tears. Also, he literally couldn't breathe.

Whelp. He really _was_ choking.

No matter – dead people don't need to breathe. Here's a fun fact: you can be dead in any environment, regardless of the atmospheric conditions – you can be dead in the desert, at the bottom of the ocean, even in the vacuum of space. _Especially_ in the vacuum of space. So, that in mind, Joshua just stopped breathing altogether.

Big mistake.

Now, you see, his intention was to pry this psycho hamster-girl off his personage and throw her to the floor like an alpha wolf, swagger coolly to the bathroom, casually rip open his windpipe and shake out the offending impetus to his respiratory system. A brilliant plan, I guess, but _of course_ the forces of the universe had to conspire against him.

Gerbil-girl basically flipped her shit. "H-Holy God! He's stopped breathing!" Panicking, she mimed goring Josh with a knife a few more times, and when that didn't seem to spur his lungs back into action, she dropped him on the floor.

Aha! Escape! Joshua tried to get to his feet and run for the hills, but she tackled him to the ground. "NO! S-stay put! The commercial said you have to stay put – you'll be okay! I-I... I'll save you!"

The girl, flustered even though she was, clambered atop his abdomen, straddling him like one might ride a sandworm. Pinning his cream puff ass to the floor with her hefty weight of ninety-four pounds. Destroying his dignity with the very fact of her existence.

Obviously, Joshua couldn't talk to her without air to run over his vocal chords – in fact, he couldn't even cough or anything. Splayed helplessly on his back with a crazy seventh-grader boarding his spaceship, he tried to signal that he was fine - but there must have been a miscommunication somewhere down the line, since instead of "Get off me, I'm okay!" the message she received was evidently "OH SWEET GLORIOUS FUCK I'M DYING."

Gerbil hammered his solar plexus with all the might she could muster – if one didn't know any better, they might have thought she was trying to kill him. The solar plexus is a very well-known pressure point, so to speak, and so each blow sent Joshua into convulsions. His mouth gawped like that of a fish, eyes practically bleeding out the tear ducts. Inside, Joshua felt his soul begin to shrivel with a deep-set agony grounded in the metaphysical realm of pathos. _She can't touch me! She has no RIGHT! She can't just CRAWL ALL OVER MY GORGEOUS BODY LIKE THIS, AAAAGH!_

He would have jesus beam'd the fuck out of her were it not for the fact that such behavior would probably get him skewered by some feathery asshole. He tried to summon up some kind of energy force-punch that would shove her off of him, but her incessant fist-pounding was kind of distracting. Each impact sort of drained his mind of all thought. Besides, he was still weakened; affecting something so heavy and solid in the RG with his powers was kind of an impossibility right now.

"Nothing... still nothing... I, uh, what comes next, uhh, _uhhhhh_ – he, he needs to breathe, so uh, um, I know! I know! I – I have to inflate his lungs manually! Then – then I'll jump on his chest and the blast of escaping air will dislodge whatever is choking him!" She looked awfully uncertain, so she injected her tone with overdone amounts of zest, as if that would somehow warp the laws of medicine to accommodate her wishes (out of pity, perhaps).

Josh kind of wanted to raise a point about how this would not help, but he couldn't talk. Frustrated, he reached out with his sputtering telekinesis, grabbed a handful of coffee straws, and started lobbing them at Gerbil's head. They bounced off her head like wavelengths of light - as if they weighed nothing. She didn't even notice.

Clearly, for the poor, prone corpse-boy, the situation had come down to this: tap out, or pass out. Joshua began to frantically slap the ground with his hand.

Gerbil was apparently not well-versed in the ways of mixed martial arts, so she plowed forth like an unstoppable steam engine run off the rails – absolutely unfazed, careening through wild tracks of country, ravaging all in her path with screaming wheels of hot iron. Josh writhed, trying desperately to buck her off - but it was if her thighs were some kind of clamp, shackling him to the ground. She reached out with an unforgiving hand, pinched his nose shut, and loomed overhead...

Joshua was absolutely mortalfied, but alas, there was nothing he could do in this situation. Weakly, he raised an arm, tried to shove her off – but without oxygen, his arm was about as useful as a limp noodle, flopping weakly against her clavicle and straining faintly. To the untrained eye, it almost resembled an affectionate caress or something dumb like that.

Using her free hand to pry open his clamped-shut jaws, she descended on his face like a _coelophysis_ snapping at fresh kill. Clamping her lips over his, she began to blow noisily and spittily.

_AUGH_, thought Joshua. NOT LIKE THIS-!

His brain abruptly shut down and instinct seized the controls. Panicking, he made awkward chewing motions with his mandible until he had her lip between his teeth.

You can probably guess what happened next.

CHOMP.

Blondie recoiled as if stung – or, rather, bitten. "AIIIIEEE!" she shrieked, clapping both hands over her mouth, eyes watering. Dick move! DIIICK MOVE!

He hadn't gnashed her delicate virgin flesh buds _too_ hard, but lips are awfully sensitive things – and besides, it came out of nowhere. Surprise amplified the pain a thousandfold.

The poor thing. She just wanted to _help_.

Joshua's hands scrabbled around on the ground, feverishly searching for purchase – he pushed himself backward, kind of tilting to the right, and attempted to scrape the girl off against the support pole of the table he had been comfortably sitting at barely five minutes prior. This, as you might imagine, did not work so well – and so Joshua finally just reached up and shoved her off.

Weakened by pain and surprise, she didn't stand a chance, not even against boneless noodle arms. Gerbil girl half-fell, half-slumped off his stomach, scooting away, shaking. From behind her firmly pressed hands, faint noises of pain and anger could be heard.

Joshua did not care about that right now, he was too concerned with A) his mouth virginity being stolen, and B) the sharp object wedged in his trachea. He staggered to his feet, leaned against a table for support, and drunkenly tottered over to the bathrooms, as per his plan. It took several pathetic tries of flinging his entire body weight against the Men's Room door, but eventually it gave and in he went, as graceful as an inebriated layabout. Moldy heart hammering, he basically collapsed over the sink, knees giving out at last, and with one cold, stubby-nailed hand he proceeded to tear his own throat open.

At first, it was hard to rip through the skin, especially with blunt fingernails. He clawed frantically at the smooth flesh, glaring at his too-close reflection, carving bright red scratch marks across his neck until small red spots appeared. From that point on the flesh began to shred, and then it was just messy.

Ectoplasm gooshed out of the gaping wound in Joshua's neck as he ripped his exposed windpipe out, splattering iridescent red all over the poor porcelain below. Ugh, what a _bother_ – Joshua just knew he'd have to clean up all this garbage later. Whatever. He held the collapsing tube of tissue in one gory palm, reached into the moist sleeve of flesh with the careful fingers of the other, and poked around until he felt something hard, smooth, and definitely not organic.

With an irritated frown he grabbed the foreign object and jerked it free, the walls of his windpipe ripping as the edges scraped the delicate tissue. He held it up to the light, aghast – though edged with gobbets of meat and drenched in his own ectoplasm, the shape was unmistakable: his spoon.

He had _inhaled_ his _coffee spoon!_

Disgusted with himself, Joshua tossed the thing over his shoulder – it hit the ground with a delicate _tink_. _Ridiculous._ Glaring in the mirror, he stroked the flesh of his neck, drawing forth energy from the white-hot wellspring at the core of his back and shaping it into fingers of healing. As if watching the scene unfold in reverse, the torn head of Joshua's windpipe flew back into its regular place, re-attaching seamlessly to the site of rippage. The surrounding tissues, though still dumping absurd amounts of ectoplasm everywhere, wove themselves back together, sealing his throat back up as if nothing had ever happened.

The entire process only took a few minutes. Joshua was left fully intact, with a sink that looked fit for a murder scene and a good-sized kiddie pool's worth of ectoplasm splattered everywhere. Even though ectoplasm resembles unusually-thin blood with colors floating in it like oil, this wasn't enough to trigger his phobia, and so instead of freaking out like a spineless wimp, Joshua was busy being dismayed over the state of his shirt. He was kind of glad that he hadn't been wearing his good clothes, but a shirt is a shirt – _and good Lord, would you just look at this sad state of affairs!_ he thought, plucking at his stained collar despairingly. Well, at least the apron had taken the brunt of the assault. SUBOORDINATE was invisible under the shiny-red splatter.

Sighing raggedly, Josh looked up at his reflection and realized his cheeks were oddly pink. Frowning, he grabbed a paper towel from the dispenser and scrubbed his face – but no, instead of coming off, the weird color stuck to his skin, like some kind of rash. Joshua immediately reacted with horror – suppose Gerbil had _crab_ for lunch or something? - but no, the pink spread didn't puff into blotchy hives and start itching horribly as per his allergy. It just kind of... sat there. Burning. Warm.

He goggled at his reflection stupidly for a moment longer before he realized he was _blushing_.

This really rustled his jimmies, let me tell you.

"Whaaaat? Wh-what is this travesty?" he demanded of the mirror, slamming his hands down on the slippery counter. "It was disgusting and juicy – sp-spitty, and not meant affectionately at all! I don't even know the broad's name!" This was funny, since the girl in question wasn't 'broad' by any stretch of the imagination. "Quit reacting like that!"

The more he thought about it, the redder his face got. He grit his teeth, face burning as if he were sticking his head in an oven – he might as well have! What was he, some kind of lovestruck maiden teeter-tottering on the bluffs of youth? (Yes.)

The fact was, having died before completing the eighth grade, Joshua had never been kissed before. Except by, you know, his mom, on the cheek, et cedra. Biting his cheek in a savage attempt to divert his thoughts, he grabbed a wad of paper towels, turned on the faucet, and started scrubbing away at the sink. This, predictably, did nothing to alleviate his mind of the idiotic predicament now needling away at his brain. You see, while not exactly a romantic person, he certainly had not wanted it to be like... like _that_ – he would have settled for a delicate peck, something prude and stingy and fairly unimpressive! And with someone he knew, not some random kid off the street! But not... not like _that_, not full of spit and biting and fists pounding his chest. That seemed a little over-indulgent, come to think of it.

But then again, who would willingly mack on a shambling corpse like him? (Put your hand down.) _Anything_ at all was a little over-indulgent, given the circumstances.

But then again again, didn't CPR not count by the official rules? _Were _there rules?

But then again again again, that CPR attempt was horribly botched! So did it even qualify as CPR proper?

Joshua clasped a cooling hand over his burning face with a melodramatic moan. He scrubbed blindly at the sink with the other, once again displaying his remarkably shitty skills at being a janitor. _Quit being such a starry-eyed waif, you fool! It doesn't matter! You're dead, you don't need to worry about this frivolous nonsense! She just wanted to keep you from choking, that's all. _

_But ah, wouldn't someone like Neku have just let you suffocate?_

_But ah-ah, Neku isn't gay._

_But ah-ah-ah, that's not the point – the point is, if you were choking to death, would Neku care enough about you as a fellow humanoid to give you CPR if he knew how?_

_But ah-ah-ah-ah, he knows I'm already dead, so why would he bother? Besides, she did the wrong kind of CPR altogether! She was supposed to do the Heimlich maneuver or something._

_But ah-ah-ah-ahh... oh, dear._

Joshua now realized he had been pushing the ectoplasm onto the floor instead of down the drain. "Good _night_, Joshua." He flung the sopping towel in his hands into the garbage can with an aggravated flick of the wrist. "To hell with it all! I'm going back to bed."

He pinched his nose bridge and slumped back against the wall, sighing tightly. _Ugh, this bothers me... _

Suddenly he clamped his teeth together very tightly, absolutely fed up with his own bullshit.

_Hmph, well, it shouldn't. Walk it off like a champ! Where's your swag, fool? WHERE IS YOUR SWAG?_

Incredibly annoyed at having something like _this_ render him about as mentally functional as any given member of the Neko Sugar Girls, Joshua decided to scrap the issue altogether. It was stupid to get in a tizzy over lip-to-lip contact performed in the context of cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and that was that. There was no gray area here; Joshua was being a flying fool. He finished cleaning the counter up (and the floor), under the pretense that, while it was indeed working, it was less work to clean up the ectoplasm while it was still wet rather than after it had congealed into hard, scabby rings. It also offered him a minute to calm the frenzied chicken that was his childish behavior. Seriously, he was being pathetic. Time to sober up and move on with things.

Still grumbling, but somewhat more organized, Joshua tossed the last wadded-up paper towel into the trash, tossed the gore-smeared apron of shame in as well, and stomped away, the bathroom left in a state of reasonable cleanliness.

Exiting the men's room, he was mildly surprised to see the girl calmly sitting back at her table, as if her afternoon was proceeding entirely as normal. With one hand, she rummaged around in the scarlet mouth of a primly-kept schoolbag, fishing for homework or something. Joshua checked anxiously, peering creepily out from behind the doorjamb - apart from a slight pinkness around her bottom lip, she seemed fine. Good. He didn't want to have ripped a chunk of meat off the poor child's face or anything. That would have been kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, she seemed oddly serene given what had just transpired, but that wasn't exactly a bad thing, so Josh counted his blessings and resolved to ignore her in the hope that they could put the entire fiasco behind themselves.

Moving with stiff steps, Joshua strutted over to his table and nonchalantly righted his fallen chair. It seemed like the thing to do, he supposed – he couldn't just leave it there on the ground like that, could he? That wasn't very city-sect. While he righted the poor thing back on its tiny metal feet, he noticed that his coffee had been spilled everywhere, undoubtedly in the earlier kerfuffle. This observation prompted a withering look and an exasperated sigh of blade-like sharpness to burst from his skull. Damn it all!

Josh _really_ wasn't in the mood for wiping anything else, so he moved to the next table over – which just so happened to be the one directly adjacent to von Hamsterviel.

He settled himself awkwardly into a new seat and wondered what he would do about breakfast now. His tea scone sandwich whatever had been an absolute flop, obviously, and his delicious frappucino was now saturating the carpet, rest its soul. Now what? Bacon? Bouillabaisse? Barge into the back room and demand more coffee from Mr. H? Oh wait, he was gone.

It wasn't that easy to keep his mind on food when Gerbil-face was right there.

Joshua, for all his mental pep talk, couldn't help but wonder if she was into him. He snuck a glance out of the corner of his eye, noting with disgust that this wretched child was doing her homework rather than goggling at his godly beauty. _Well, then! Be a prudent student, why don't you? _The boy huffed slightly, and since he didn't want to eat napkins, continued to glare softly at the girl from behind.

There was something about her... something lifeless. This something had fled the premises like a bat out of hell when he'd choked on his spoon, but now the girl seemed just as unmoved as before. However, he noticed that her hands were shaking, and that she had her legs wound together as tightly as possible. _Perhaps not so serene, eh?_ The thought that he could scramble the emotions of the women like this just _tickled_ Joshua. _Hee hee hee..._

She also seemed to be muttering something under her breath - Joshua's hair covered his ears, so he couldn't exactly tell what. He made an educated guess and assumed it was some kind of occult summoning chant.

Because his nosiness knew no bounds, Joshua craned his neck and tried to see what the girl was working on. A ream of papers was spread out beneath her doll-like elbows, looking almost like scattered feathers. "Literary Analysis..." He subconsciously read the header of one of the pages under his breath.

The effect was nigh instantaneous – as if the words themselves were an axe taken to a tank of liquid nitrogen, the temperature in the room seemed to plummet fifty degrees.

The girl froze.

Joshua froze.

Slowly, with the stilted motion of a grotesque puppet, the girl turned around to stare at him. She looked slightly fearful, like he came back to bite her ear off, too. "Wh... What are you doing?"

"...Reading your literary analysis."

There was silence.

"The title intrigued me," Joshua said after a moment.

(The title in question was "Literary Analysises are For Lame-o's.")

The girl's cheeks reddened and she sort of recoiled slightly. "O-Oh... huh. It's just my homework."

Joshua sniffed. "Homework? Pfeh, that's a word I haven't heard in a long, long time..."

She glanced at him. "...What, are you a drop-out?"

"I... _no_," Joshua snapped, indignant. "Not of my own choosing, no."

She looked at him with a tabulating stare, frowning a little. "W-Well, don't just stop _there_. Why, exactly, aren't you in school?"

Joshua stretched casually, looking off into the windows. "Extenuating circumstances arose and forced me to cut my education short."

"What kind of 'extenuating circumstances?'"

"Death."

Smooth as buttercream, this boy.

The girl stared at him for a moment, and slowly the slight taint of 'you-gotta-be-kidding-me' melted off her face. "...O-Oh. Sorry." She clutched at her bell pendant nervously, eyes suddenly downcast. Then, "So... are you a player?"

"Ha! Me, a simple _Player? _Pfft!" He snorted obnoxiously. "Think _bigger_, my dear."

"...A Reaper?"

He giggled. "I eat Reapers for breakfast."

Gerbil hesitated for a second, her small frown deepening. "...Composer?"

He curled a strand of flyaway hair around his finger, smiling mischievously. "That's classified."

"Oh, jeez..." she murmured. A fierce blush devoured her face meat, her straw-like hair practically curling from the heat, and she buried her face in her small hands. "I-I... I-I'm so sorry, oh... oh, no..."

"All is forgiven," Joshua said, smirking. "Worry you not, youngling."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," she mumbled, tugging her hat down over her eyes. She looked like she wanted to vanish into that darkness. Joshua's lips curled further – ah, sweet, sweet revenge. "Y-You're 'prolly going to kill me... just like Neku, oh... I-I'm not normally like this! I'm usually very polite!" Ah, pleading for favor, eh?

"And what makes me so abhorrent that you go out of your way to make me such an exception?" Joshua batted his pretty eyelashes innocently, really enjoying this.

The girl cringed slightly. "I'm... I'm really not... I didn't know, uh..." A deep, hollow sigh rushed out of her, as her frantic embarrassment cooled. "You were _choking,_ dude! I can't just sit there and watch someone... choke! I had to f-fulfill my end of the social contract! I-I just... I never took CPR classes, but I watched someone do it on TV..."

"You do realize you could have killed me with your tomfoolery?" His drawl was almost painful to listen to, jeez. "Lucky me, I'm already dead."

She paled. "O-Oh! I'm s-so sorry, sir! It won't happen again... I just... kind of lost it, I mean, like, I haven't been myself... a-and you were right there,choking, and I had to do _something_ – forgive me, p-please, sir..."

Sir! This pleased Joshua. He puffed up like a peacock, ego swelling. "I see. So you say you've been feeling off lately... In what way?" He inspected his stubby fingernails uber-casually, just in case she worked up the nerve to glance at him. "Depending on the circumstances, I might spare you yet."

She frowned a little more. "It's really nothing, I mean – I just feel kind of..." She dug a knuckle into her temple and swirled roughly. "...Empty."

Joshua swept an eye over that glittering million-yen pendant. "Empty how, exactly?"

"It's... It's kind of..." She folded her hands in her lap. "Um... It's hard to concentrate… to _think_, really. It's sort of like... Like there's this hole in my head, and the edges are itchy, but I can't scratch them."

"Huh."

Shyly, or perhaps just uncertainly, she looked at him out of the corner of her eye. "Um... well... never mind that! It's nothing to, uh, concern yourself with." She chanced a nervous laugh. "'If the front gets through, the rest will drag.' I'm sure it'll all work out in the end, hehe."

Joshua scoffed. "Implying I would concern myself with your itchy orifices in the first place." High on power as he was, his sarcasm was running loose and untrained like a bull in a china shop, and he wasn't really thinking in the way of the socialite. (The kid lives in a sewer, give him a break.)

The girl looked like she'd been stabbed. "R-Right... um... I...I'm sorry, I'm sure you've got better things to do than, uh, listen to my goofy little trifles, uh... Bigger fish to fry, right?" Her weak smile crumpled, and she sighed again, softly. "...I shouldn't have opened my big mouth. Sorry..."

"Hmph. Your self-esteem is lacking, I see." It was more of a spoken mental note than an observation meant to be taken as insightful. Joshua took in a deep breath of the cold air. "Buck up, kiddo."

"H-Huh?"

"That's what Mr. H would say if he were in," Joshua muttered. He looked at her sharply, and tried to offer some of his own advice. "You're acting weak. Stop it."

Her injured look only worsened. Joshua saw her spine visibly deflate as she slumped in her chair and felt a little tweak in his shriveled husk of a conscience. "I-I know... Sorry..."

"I'm not being _mean_," he said quickly, fidgeting with his hair. "I was being _facetious _earlier. But really, acting like a victim will win you no prizes."

The girl was silent for a time.

Joshua felt that this was something of a bad omen. "Ah... well. Enough about that. I don't care to dwell on the negatives, if I can help it. What's your homework about?"

"What _isn't_ it about?" The girl leaned on an arm, staring at the spread with a hollow-blue gaze. It was as if she were looking at a tax refund and not simple schoolwork. "I've got to get this done, but..."

Standing, Joshua took the goofy sunglasses off his eyes and set them on his tabletop. "Here," he said, boldly closing the distance between him and her with a cocky step or two. "I'll show you how it's done, don't worry."

The girl looked a little taken aback by this. "Um..."

Joshua sat down in the chair next to her and scooted in so that he had an excellent vantage point. "No, really. Where's your problem?"

"I'm not exactly having any real _problems_," the girl said slowly, still looking at him with all the incredulous awe you'd expect if she'd never shared a table with another humanoid before in her life. "I just don't... _want_ to do it..."

"A teenager who doesn't want to do her homework? Shocking." Rolling his eyes, Joshua grabbed her literary analysis paper and scanned through it. Her writing ability was only slightly above average, he noted; somewhat blandly-written, with short sentences and no-frills description, the only remarkable thing about the essay was how she threw in a famous quote or adage every other sentence. Why, in fact, it looked almost as if it had been written without much mind to the subject material – she had just written this to get it over with, it seemed like, but it was quite passable for a middle-schooler. It was still way better than Neku's poetry, anyway. "Hm. No issues here."

"There _aren't_ any issues, I said," the girl repeated. "I just don't want to do it, that's all."

Joshua continued to wordlessly paw through the papers, letting nostalgia wash him away. He even remembered getting some of these assignments, very vaguely. They brought back dull memories of sitting in a antiseptic-smelling bed, a writing pad propped awkwardly on his knees; he remembered often falling into a delightful state of flow that churned out vibrantly-worded ten-page reports on how the predictable plot of the required reading book was actually a stealthily-concealed satire of the archetypical tropes so often found in fiction. Yes, homework was great fun compared to watching your IV sway for hours on end.

He glanced at the girl and smiled carefully. "Well, why not get it over with? It really isn't all that bad."

"But there's just so _much_..." She was rubbing her temple again. "And I have a headache, and I'm so tired... I just..."

"Shh. No whining. Where's your pencil?"

She handed it to him.

"Thank you. Now, please tell me which class's homework you hate the most and why."

"Math," she muttered. "Language. Science. All of them. All of them!" She threw her hands in the air and mooooaaaaned. "Math is boring, language is boring, it's all boring!"

"It's not boring when you're bedridden, I assure you." Joshua drew from the pile at random and found some worksheet for something or other. The author is deliberately being vague because they do not know what kind of worksheets are in Japan. Probably Japanese ones. Anyway, Joshua went through it pretty easily, despite not having so much as touched a textbook for around two years. "Ah... I missed this..." The memories of doing homework for hours while a pleasant breeze blew through his open window were nice ones. He had dragged every single assignment out as much as possible, mind you – half of those hours were spent doodling mecha battles in the margins. After a moment or two, he set the finished paper down with a flourish.

The girl yawned. "You can do it all, if you want."

Joshua would have, but he didn't need to study. He was dead. He had an almost-godly database of information tattooed on his back, for crying out loud. This girl, on the other hand, was very much alive and mortal – and her life depended on passing grades. "I'm not that easy to fool, girl. No, one's enough for me."

"...It's Rhyme," she said after a minute. "I'm Rhyme Bito."

"That's kind of an odd name," Joshua said offhandedly, rolling the slightly-crushed pencil between two pianist fingers. "Engrish."

"It's not my _real _name," Rhyme muttered. "My brother... he nicknamed me that. Sort of."

"You don't sound too pleased."

"Well, it's... Engrish."

All of a sudden, she burst into giggling. Eyes widening in horror, Rhyme quickly clasped her hand over her mouth. "Ah. Um. Sorry..."

Joshua didn't say anything, just let one eyebrow slowly scroll up his forehead.

"S-Stop that," she sputtered, grinning.

Joshua flipped his hair and smiled bemusedly. "If you say so. Well, Rhyme, I'm Joshua."

"Hey! That's Engrish, too, you hypocrite!" she said. Something about that sentence sent her back into a fit of hilarity, practically shoving her fingers in her mouth.

"Um, no. 'Joshua' is a perfectly legitimate name. 'Rhyme' is not. Nobody names their child 'Rhyme' unless they come from a hippie commune." He smirked a little, twisting a curl of hair. On the inside, he was kind of weirded out by her nervous giggling. "...If it's any consolation, that's not my real name either."

Rhyme still looked disproportionately happy about it. "Did... somebody brand you against your will, too?" she asked, tentatively – still awkwardly beaming. It was kind of weird, but the look in her eyes looked a little more vibrant, at least.

"I was 'branded' by my parents, but I like it better anyway." Joshua sniffed.

"Oh," said Rhyme.

"What is it about this conversation," Joshua asked, giving her a look of mock suspicion. "that sends you to such a state of euphoria, exactly?"

The girl began grinding her finger into her temple again. "W-Well... it's just not that often you meet somebody else with the their own nomenclature." She scrunched her face up with what looked like disgust. "I have like, three names. It's awful."

"Well, lots of people have many nicknames. For example, I've heard one person - I won't say who - called such things as Pumpkin, Tiger, Box-boy, Orangeylocks, Phones, Nekky..." Joshua said. He was suddenly hit with a crippling realization: the current topic of conversation was painfully lame. "What's so special about that?"

"I mean, _English _nomenclature. But th-that's not all! I..." She paused. "Well... You say my name right."

"Huh?"

With a sense of trepidation around her, she spoke quietly. "Everyone else says... '_Raimu_.'" She said that last word as if it left a bitter taste on her tongue, which was a little silly.

Joshua snorted. "Oh, I see." He made a mental note: _if irritating Rhyme is ever necessary, refer to her exclusively as Raimu._

Here, Rhyme tugged at her hair a little. "...You're a freak of nature, too."

"If you mean blonde, yes... but if you don't mean blonde, shame on you."

Rhyme yanked on her hair harder, as if to really drive the point home. "Also... you died. And you like this cafe. You know Neku, clearly."

"Oh boy, we're twins."

Rhyme smiled a little. "Birds of a feather, hehe."

At this point, the conversation kind of flatlined.

Joshua whipped his phone out and checked the time. Mr. H had only been gone fifteen minutes. He had been known to wander around Shibuya for hours on end. A bit of selfish panic began to flutter around in Joshua's lungs – was he really expected to entertain this kid for the rest of the day? Not that he had anything better to do, except maybe press his face against the Shibuya boundary and make nasty faces at Ikebukuro for a while.

It wasn't that Joshua was having a hellish time talking to Gerbil-face, because he wasn't. It was only mildly excruciating. But that was the thing - he was fairly certain that the longer a conversation with him dragged on, the faster the probability of him saying something incredibly douchetastic approached one. He contemplated starting up a game of High N Low. _That_ would probably keep the girl from piping up again, since nobody likes talking to people while they're playing solo video games.

"Neku talks a lotta trash about you," Rhyme said quietly.

"Ooh, scary, scary." He rolled his eyes.

"...But you don't seem that bad."

"Hm!" Josh put his phone away. "Of course not. My personality isn't horrible."

"No! You're not horrible!" Rhyme's eyes widened. "Y-You're nice! Kind of... I mean, you're not _that_ bad..."

Josh took his phone out again and fired up the High N Low.

Rhyme bit her thumbnail. "...What are you doing?"

"Oh, nothing," he grumbled, dropping the orange hunk of junk on the table with a decisive air. _Ponk. _"So... about that itchy orifice of yours. Is it feeling better now?"

Rhyme blinked at him a few times before the word "orifice" translated into "hole" rather than some other definition her brain flat-out rejected. "Uh... well, now that you mention it... I guess? I mean, it's not itching that much."

"Maybe all it needs is just need a little TLC." He paused. "You know, a little... _stimulation_."

Rhyme blinked, blinked, blinked, blinked, blinked...

"_Intellectual _stimulation, darling," Joshua drawled, bemused (as usual). "Read a book. Better yet, do your homework."

"O-Oh! Right!" She whipped around, made to finish some essay or other – and froze. "Uh... You have my pencil."

Joshua plonked it down in front of her.

"Th-Thanks..." She paused, considering something. "Mister... uh, Lord Composer, sir, um..."

"Good gravy, girl. Just 'Joshua' is fine." He rolled his eyes. Such crazy levels of respect were so polite, they were almost insulting. Beyond that, Joshua didn't like being called 'Composer,' like everything that kept him human was gone. "Besides, I never said I was Composer, did I?"

Rhyme looked horribly embarrassed. "Oh... s-sorry..." She looked up at him, sheepish. "Are you sure that's okay? Just Joshua?"

This mentality of hers was for the weak. Joshua narrowed his eyes almost imperceptibly at her, slightly irritated. "If I just said it's fine, _it's fine_."

"Oh... um, okay. It's just that... I... accidentally did that to some people, once, and... and they kinda... thought I was insulting them. The nail that sticks out most gets hammered down hardest..." She pressed her knuckles deep into her eyes, groaning. "I-I was new, okay?"

"Hm. How 'new' are you, exactly?"

"I've lived in Japan for two years," she said, cheeks burning bright pink. "Approximantely."

Joshua nodded slowly, arching an eyebrow. "Ah..." She'd been here about as long as he'd been dead. _...Interesting. She's almost like me, if I only I were an overly emotive, female doormat with a delinquent reaper for a role model. If she just read a few more books... maybe developed ESP... _He had a vision of himself, taking her under his wing and grooming her to become a gender-swapped clone of himself, but he killed that train of thought quickly. Clones were nothing but bad news.

He glanced back at the girl.

She looked absolutely petrified, like a deer caught in the headlights. "Shit! I said approximately wrong!" was written all over her face.

He sighed.

"Rhyme... it's okay. I know it must be hard." It was the chunk of Neku's soul in him, he swore. "But, there's no need to be so worried. I don't mind."

He was incredibly worn out from that excruciating whopper of a motivational speech, but it seemed to work. The girl looked like a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders, even though her blush deepened to fresh, cavernous depths. "D-Don't tell anyone, okay? I might die..."

"Look at you, implying I actually talk to people." He snorted. "My lips are sealed."

She smiled shyly. "Thank you..."

"Do your homework, already."

With a small 'eep!' she quickly turned away from him, burying her scarlet face in a sheet of math problems. For what, the third time? Joshua decided he was being too much of a distraction, so he stood up, pushed his chair in, and slowly strutted off to the back room.

"Bye," Rhyme said softly.

He waved casually.

Once out of sight, he shut the door behind him and sighed, rubbing his temple. Great. Egotism aside, she probably wouldn't be able to write him off too easily – and, worst-case scenario, that meant the cafe was going to get a new regular. Joshua would have shed a tear for the slaying of yet another of the endangered species of "quiet places" in Shibuya, were it not for the fact that his tear ducts were shriveled and long-dry.

Well, maybe that was an exaggeration. She seemed unobtrusive enough.

He had a sudden thought – maybe he ought to scan her? Neku and his passle of ducklings typically kept their player pins secured tightly to their collective personage, presumably to lock him out, which was kind of insulting. But he hadn't seen his pin on that girl. Maybe she forgot it? Maybe she didn't see the point in it, given that they had never met?

Curiously, he dropped the barrier around his consciousness and let it flow outward, opening a scan circle. Immediately a flood of stars poured into his mind's eye, a glittering galaxy that spread seemingly infinitely in every direction. Like swarms of locusts, the red, prickly, ever-present clouds of Noise symbols leaped into focus, sticking at his extrasensory perception like thistles, menacing. "Oh, bug off," he muttered. So irritating. For a moment's breath, he took in the sheer majesty of it all – and then he sharpened his focus to a thin tendril. He reached out, gently tapped at Rhyme's soul. The star-like thing was unusually-bright, but it had the tendency to flicker, which was strange.

Thankfully, her mind was open. Joshua dipped inside, always delicate with this sort of thing. It was kind of like stepping into a pool, rather than doing a cannonball. The splash was less noticable.  
>What he saw next was disturbing.<p>

Yes, the cluster of blue thought fragments spiraling through the blue pit of her mind were normal. They whispered vaguely, like clipped sound-bytes. Older thoughts were darker, deeper, hazier. Like a cascade of signs slowly sinking into a bottomless pit, almost – but that wasn't disturbing at all. That was entirely expected.

The disturbing part was that Rhyme actually _did _have a hole in her head.

Looking into a normal mind was sort of like looking into a deep, deep well. But Rhyme's mind did not slowly transition to the murky, hazy blackness of the preconscious.

At the bottom of the well of her mind, he saw something like a gaping bullet wound. A hole. A red-ringed, tattered-edged hole, that led not into darkness, but screaming static. The bladed hiss of white noise bled from it, scratching at the walls of the well like claws on a dungeon wall.

Although looking into the void was an experience comparable to shoving a power drill in your eye and letting it run, Joshua could see – just barely – that something was in there.

Something was _in _that hole.

Suddenly – as if Joshua were trapped in a nightmare, watching something so hazy and distant and terrifying that it didn't seem real - that Something looked up at him.

And screamed.

NOPE.

Joshua yanked his thought-tendril out of Rhyme's mind and jammed it back in his skull at the speed of light. He slammed the scan circle shut, wrenched his eyes open, and scrambled away from the door, as if even standing in the same place would let that... _thing_... grab at him, drag him down into that white-hot cauldron of static.

He stood there, pressed to the wall, breathing hard, for a second. Slowly, his panic ebbed, and he came back to earth – he felt the sturdiness of the building around him, cradling. His legs were suddenly quite weak. Dizzy, he slumped to the ground, staring at the door with an absolutely boggled expression on his face. "What in the world...?"

Joshua had never seen something like that – not ever. He had never even _heard _of anything like that. Never, never. _Never_.

This... this was...

What _was _it?

Joshua pinched his nose bridge, sighing. _Great._

It looked like he wouldn't be able to write off Rhyme Bito any time soon, either.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **BUT KIPPER YOU HATE ROMANCE!

YEAH I REALLY DO IT'S STUPID

BUT I DO IT FOR FRIENDSHIP!

Bugh this pairing is hard for me to write because it is like, NO SHENANIGANS, SHH ONLY ANGSTING NOW

guh I hate shipping

my fembro kisa beta'd this for me since I needed an impartial judge...


	2. Joshua Separates his Prey from the Herd

_**THE **__**BROKEN **__**DREAMS**_

CHAPTER TWO: IN WHICH JOSHUA PUNCHES RHYME IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS AND KIND OF FEELS BAD ABOUT IT BUT NOT THAT MUCH

Rating: T for Language I Guess

Genre: Friendship, Romance...?

OF NOTE IN THIS CHAPTER: Joshua meddles, Rhyme isn't too impressed

* * *

><p>It was the day after the fiasco at WildKat. Sunday, if you're not keeping track.<p>

This particular Sunday was, shockingly enough, a sunny day, of pleasant temperature and calm sky. Now, Joshua was sick of laying in the dank old dungeon of the Shibuya River all day, but the Angels had been bugging him about staying in the Underground, like it said in his job requirements. He had little choice but to comply for now – he was kind of toeing a fine line with those fine fellows at the present juncture.

And so, Joshua whiled away the bored hours by ghosting around the UG, aimlessly doing flips and tumbles in the air over Udagawa, pretending to karate-kick people in the head in the Scramble, tripping over Pig Noise symbols at Pork City. He meandered over to the north border and pressed himself against it, making nasty faces at Ikebukuro for an hour while watching their Reapers fly back and forth, chasing two rather pissed-looking Himegyaru girls around. It was the final day of their Game, clearly. One of them finally got sick of it and fired a few rounds in his direction, prompting Joshua to flee from the scene of the crime.

This sort of thing continued for a few more hours. Annoyingly enough, Joshua couldn't get that freaky-deaky hole thing off his mind. Even as he floated around, doing everything and nothing, he wasn't very entertained for very long – his mind had many opportunities to wander, and when it did, it always seemed to loop back around to that hole in Rhyme's head.

He had looked it up on the Internets last night, but such a condition didn't seem to have been documented yet – that, or the servers were deleting useful information by the terabyte to make room for more cat videos. He had _not_ asked Mr. H about the hole yet, but he didn't want to. Not now, at least, since Mr. H was still sending reports to the Angel hivemind. Joshua's foresight, or maybe just his logic, sensed a connection between the hole and the fact that Rhyme had been erased and (illegally) retrieved. Alerting Mr. H to this problematic hole could potentially alert all of the Higher Plane as well. If possible, Josh wanted to see if he could quietly make the issue go away before it gained an unwanted audience. Doing so would boost their confidence in his abilities as Composer, surely. Maybe they'd get off his back for once.

Of course, trying to amend illegal activity with more illegal activity was hardly an excellent plan, but if we were to cut through the many layers of bullshit encrusting his being, it would become apparent that Joshua just didn't want Mr. H lecturing him.

At the moment, Joshua was levitating high in the air over Dogenzaka hill, thrown back in a reclining position. His dull eyes stared into the hazy blue sky without really seeing it, distracted by his bored thoughts of boredom. "It's all such a bother," he mumbled to himself, idly scratching at his arm.

Suddenly, there was a small clamor from below him. Voices he recognized tapped at his ears, registering in his conscious as Neku and his fancy brigade of ducklings. Josh rolled over in the air so that his arms dangled like balloon strings, curious. He hadn't seen that fool in a while, so he lowered his altitude carefully until he could sit on top of one of the decorative trees. It wasn't like he had anything better to do.

The very tips of Neku's orange crown of spiky shit poked through the faceless crowds like a shark fin, so he was the first to be spotted. He emerged from the writhing horde, looking as surly as ever, but... There was a certain softness to his eyes that belied his newfound harem of friends.

He was wearing a stripey, long-sleeved shirt, in accordance with the cooling weather. Joshua was momentarily distracted by the fact that Neku's armpits weren't showing. It was almost surreal.

Neku was bickering with a bespectacled girl. She looked like she would have towered over him, had she not been stooping like a hunchback, huddled around a stuffed cat toy. Her hair was untouched by dyes, shiny and dark, but it was cut short enough that she almost looked like a longish-haired boy to the untrained eye. Josh didn't care about her.

The two of them stalked over to the front of Ramen Don and slouched against the wall like a couple of loitering thugs, perfectly in time with each other. Such a pretty synch rate... Joshua sniffed snootily, folding his arms in a huff.

Neku pulled a permanent marker out of his pocket as if drawing a sword from its scabbard. He looked at the girl and told her dumb things. "I'm telling you, Sheek. This is my calling."

"Doodling schwa thymbols all over public property? That'th not a calling. That'th a lame... thing. To be doing. And, like, probably kinda illegal, too."

"Shiki. Shiki, you don't understand. I have to spread the legacy, Shiki."

Shiki stomped her foot with the good-natured kind of irritation. "Neku, no. There _ith_ no legathy. You thaw that thing in a _bathroom_, Neku! It'th grody _bathroom __graffiti_, that'th all!"

Neku began to draw schwas (Ə) all over the entrance to Ramen Don. His tone adopted lofty airs: "It's the voice of the masses. The power of the people. Bathroom graffiti is the 2chan of the art world, Shiki. It has a dingy, disgusting beauty all its own, like a delicate, pure white lily smeared with shit, rolled in a garbage heap and covered in wriggly earthworms."

"Bleh! _You__'__re_ dithguthting!" Shiki bashed her face into Mr. Mew's cuddly head with exasperation, giggling a little.

Neku shook his head, grinning slightly, and finished covering the door handle with upside-down-and-backwards e's. So it was that the pair fell to silence once more, leaning quietly against the wall. Neku noticed there was some incriminating ink on his sleeve and cuffed it, frowning.

Joshua stared at them, incredulous. _Neku__, __why __the __hell __are __you __so __boring__._

He toyed with the idea of shooting spitballs at the two of them from the safety of the UG, but decided against it. He didn't have anything to make the spitballs with other than waxy tree leaves, you see. Bleh.

After about a minute, there was something of a ripple in the crowd, as innocent bystanders dove out of the way of some incoming missile of a person. The delinquent ex-Reaper careened into sight, plowing through several people who weren't fast enough to clear the path, and screeched to a halt in the general vicinity of the noodle place. Kicking the skateboard into his thick arms, Beat Bito bellowed his latest achievement to the heavens. "BOOYAKA! THATS'A NEEEEEW RECORD, _HEY__-__OOO__!_" He then did an incredibly lame dance.

Joshua was halfway through wishing he'd brought a whiffle bat to smack the kid with when he remembered who exactly was related to this disruption made flesh.

And through the disgruntled throng came she, apologizing profusely every step of the way and helping those fallen to their feet despite their vaguely weirded-out looks. With a small sigh, she staggered up to her brother's flank and proceeded to punch him in the gut, lambasting him for being such a nuisance. And that punch was no cute little pansy strike of the weakling, no. That punch had _substance_. The people on the sidewalk behind the siblings glared at them slightly and went on about their business.

Thus the passle of ducklings was assembled at last, clustered around the orange-crested punk and the kingdom of delicious noodles. They briefly swatted banter back and forth, like kittens with a wadded-up ball of tissue, and then prepared to go inside and "get to the eating already," as per Beat's request. Joshua recalled, with a twinge of annoyance, that he couldn't follow the troupe inside since the UG and RG were as one inside that store. _Hrmphrpghrph_.

As if to add insult to injury, Neku kicked the Player pin emblem marking the doorjamb as he vanished into Ramen Don.

Feeling as put out as a spat-upon birthday candle, Joshua wrenched open a scan field and shot for Neku's brain, only to bounce off like a super ball chucked at a glass door. A sharp crack of pain illuminated his mind's eye – his arms windmilled and he tumbled backwards out of the tree, looking like a total idiot.

_Of _course _he__'__s __wearing __the __Player __pin__._ Grinding his teeth softly, Joshua pulled himself out of the concrete and glared at their backs. Out of spite, he slapped each one's soul with a tendril of mind as they entered the restaurant, getting away from him – and each soul rejected him with the same burning barrier. Except Rhyme's.

The tender walls of her consciousness tore at the unexpected force of his mind-slap, and she cried out in surprise and pain, falling on her sitter with a bump and clutching at her head. "Ack!"

Shoot. He hadn't meant to do that.

The angry hiss of a thousand hungry locusts filled Joshua's awareness and he retreated quickly into the safety of his own skull, shutting the scan field behind him. Scrambling to his ghostly feet, he stood in the middle of the road and let the cars swish through him, tasting the metal and upholstery in his mouth. He wondered if he ought to run off before somebody theorized his meddling and their collective opinion of him worsened ("Confound that Joshua, always punching holes in our friends' heads! How dare he, I say!"). Or, you know, help Rhyme out instead, like a good little boy scout.

She was sitting there on the sidewalk, blinking weakly. She looked like she was seeing stars or tripping on acid or something. Her brother had pulled a perfect 180 and now gripped her by the shoulders, shaking her a little and making lots of frantic noises. "Rhyme...? Yo, Rhyme! You okay, sis?" Neku and Shiki had tried to whirl around and fly to her side at the same time and collided in the process; their tangle of limbs was firmly wedged in the doorway. They couldn't reach Rhyme, anyway – not with Beat blocking them, the elephantine beast that he was.

Of course,_he_ was unbound by such physical restraints. Joshua drifted over lazily, skirting the gridlock of writhing teenagers with delicate distaste. He ground to a halt over Rhyme's head and nudged her with his ghostly foot, prompting her to sneeze. While her mind would have repaired itself on its own after a moment, for some reason Joshua felt obligated to fix it for her – maybe he had the thought that this might somehow also fix the hole in one fell swoop. Reaching into that white-hot wellspring of power in his back, he scooped up a handful, Imprinted it with the order to heal, and basically dumped it on her head, as if he were cracking an egg.

The rush of Composer energy pooled all over her head and wove the torn edges back together. Rhyme blinked, looked him in the eyes for a split second.

He practically did a backflip jumping back into the relative safety of his tree. The bitter taste of leaves filled his mouth and brought a wave of pissiness crashing into his general being.

"Ow," said Rhyme finally, blinking a few times.

"Are you okay?" Neku asked, the concern in his voice slightly muffled by the cat plush stuffed in his face. He could barely be heard over Beat's overjoyed garbling, anyway.

Rhyme shoved her brother off and wriggled into a standing position, sighing and rubbing her temple. "Yeah. I think I walked into the wall or something... ow."

That temple she kept rubbing. That was probably where the far edge of the hole in her mind was. Josh frowned, spitting out a leaf a few times before he remembered he wasn't in the RG and he couldn't.

Gerbil-girl turned to face Neku inc., and she then did something that looked kind of weird from behind. Threading her pale fingers behind her back, she rose up on the balls of her feet, shoulders rising and head tilting to the side very slightly. It looked kind of like if she were a plush toy having a principal seam pulled. "I'm fine guys. Really! Hehe..."

_What __in __the __world__..._ Josh squinted suspiciously at the girl, but only after he heard her tiny giggle did it dawn on him that she was probably smiling. Conducting a weird full-body smile, that is, as if thrusting every ounce of authenticity she could gather out through her face. It occurred to him that perhaps this smile was slightly forced.

_...__Yeah__, __no __shit__, __Sherlock__._ He rubbed his forehead distractedly, frowning.

She followed her compadres into Ramen Don, her shoulders noticeably sagging when everybody's back was turned to her once again. Strangely enough, Joshua felt a small trickle of disappointment – but it wasn't his. It came from Rhyme, as if they had made a really, really weak pact. While it felt different, there was nothing too unusual about this. Josh had just spewed some of his shiny Composer energy on her head; it was probably still transmitting signals back to the mothership, like an abandoned yet unbroken probe.

Now, if Joshua had any sense of knowing when to quit, that would have been it. He would have been off to ogle schoolgirl idols or something, maybe punch some kids in the psyche and take their origami paper from them so he could fold a bunch of shitty cranes. He would have packed his bags and soared off into the sky, vanishing from the lives of his dumbass Artists and returning to the bleak eternity he was anchored to. If he had, we would be looking at a rehash of the Slowing Down or something.

As it happened, Joshua was bored senseless and intrigued by that hole at the same time. And, as he thought more about it, his foresight prickled all over, telling him that her condition was... worsening. The state of her mind was degrading steadily, and it would continue to degrade at a rapid pace. Washing over him like a splash of hot water, Joshua foresaw a vague vision – like a feeling of instinctual knowing, he saw there would be a huge breakdown of some kind on Rhyme's end. The foggy haziness of the vision told that what he saw was far off, but all the same, the end result would be death – a Rhyme's twisted and mangled body lying in the middle of the road; a Rhyme's cold corpse nestled in the grass of Miyashita Park, as though simply sleeping. And not just death, but immediate erasure, for her Soul would be so broken, so damaged that it would be unable to ascend to the UG in one piece.

A bad future if he ever saw one. And disturbing, given what he knew about the girl. Joshua frowned – the vision showed him the end of Rhyme, but that end was still long to come. Perhaps... he could intervene, and change the paths of destiny before she crumbled away into dust?

He felt a strange sense of power, as though he controlled Rhyme's existence completely. Should he try and save Rhyme from her fate, or watch her fall apart? The Angels would have encouraged the latter, seeing as how he wasn't supposed to mess around in the RG, nor was he supposed to have resurrected her in the first place. Simply letting her die would fix all his problems with the Higher Plane since her soul would be returning to where it rightfully belonged as per the Game's rules. Neku and company would still appreciate him for bringing her back to life even though she was doomed from the start. It would all be very clean and simple.

However... a memory stirred within him, one he cared not to dwell upon too much nowadays. A memory of someone very important to Joshua, a memory of a powerful spirit breaking over something he did - or rather, didn't do. He had stood aside and let them crumble, even though it hurt like nothing else to watch them waste their mind and waste their talents. Why? Because he was too great a coward to face them, that's why.

Never again.

And then, it was decided. He couldn't let that happen again. He refused to stand by and watch another person squander away their potential until their soul shattered into pieces.

Some of his shiny Composer vapors were still circulating through Rhyme's soul like a blood transfusion, and there they would remain until they eventually synced up with her vibe and became as one with her native energies. But, if he scanned her while they were still distinct, entering through the whirlpool-like patch of Composer Soul in her head, his intrusion would probably be completely unnoticed. You'd think he'd have a little aversion to the idea as he'd just torn her head open a few minutes ago, but he reasoned away any guilt he might have felt with thoughts like _I __already __fixed __it_ and _Got __to __gather __information __holy __shit ~__mysteries__.~_

Thus Joshua made himself comfortable in his tree, opened up a scan circle once again, and extended his thought-probe out into the blue. Whispery snatches of thought filtered in through the edges of his awareness, but Josh was a man on a mission. He had no need to dive into the minds of a punch of goofy pedestrians, whether or not they were presently thinking about the episode of Tin Pin Slammurai that he missed. He shook 'em off and reached through the wall of Ramen Don. Exercising some semblance of care this time, he delicately dipped himself into the smear of Joshua soul spiraling over Rhyme's mind.

Entering her head in this way, he was immediately assaulted by a weird string of flashing images. He was briefly stunned – but quickly realized these images were simply a nauseatingly disjointed projection of what Rhyme was seeing right now. This didn't usually happen when scanning, unless... the tiny part of his soul grafted to hers was, indeed, obediently transferring the thoughts that flowed through it back to its owner, almost like a wiretap. Joshua got a brief twinge of uneasiness – after all, you shouldn't just go around, microchipping people's skulls – but he supposed it was just an aftereffect of him patching up the poor girl and couldn't be helped.

A tiny twinge of guilt didn't mean he wasn't going to totally take advantage of the situation.

Below him was the hole, hissing and spitting like a kicked cat. Josh did his best to ignore its caustic existence and focused on adjusting his vibe until the disjointed flow of images stabilized somewhat. This was all very boring.

Suddenly, his mind's eye was flooded with Neku. Neku, Neku, everywhere.

Rhyme was apparently ogling Neku from the corner of her eye. Ogling him in the girly way. Filtered through the lens of Rhyme-o'-vision, he looked incredibly tall and super-manly, practically surrounded by a cloud of sparkles and floating, translucent blossoms. His skin seemed to glow, as though he were a girl on a makeup commercial. The tips of his fiercely-orange bangs had a tendency to tangle in his thick, luscious lashes with every other blink, and his_eyes_... His eyes were like pools of liquid sapphire – piercing, transfixing, amazing. Filled with an inner steel, they burned bright with the joy of living again; these were the eyes of a warrior that had fought through the infernal legions of Hell itself, armed with only a pile of pins and a cell phone. They told tales of kicking reason to the curb and generally being a totally unbelievable badass, fighting destiny with all he had, and winning against all odds – and her existence itself was testament to his greatness. He glanced at her and smiled slightly, his pink lips twitching into a small, secret curve.

He was _beautiful_.

Joshua scowled at the disgusting sight. _Rhyme__, __why __can__'__t __you __be __a __lesbian__._

Apart from the awkwardness of seeing Neku, another male, through eyes of purest estrogen, Josh had it on good authority that she hadn't ogled HIM like that. Joshua ground his teeth. The _nerve _of this girl! _Truly__, __such __impudence __deserves __a __punishment__. __She__'__s __just __wasting __her __time __with __that __hipster__ - __why __can__'__t __she __see __how __fabulous _I _am__? __Ugh__!_

After a second of this overblown pouting, he got over it. Gently, he imprinted the meme "Ramen" into Rhyme's soft, pithy brain matter so she'd quit exposing him to Sakuraba fumes.

It worked like a charm – she turned her head away and stared at the counter, tapping her fingers. The general theme of the thoughts floating past Joshua's astral elbow turned away from "Jeez, Neku looks good with long sleeves..." to "Dag nab it when will the food get here."

Even so, Neku's every utterance punctured her ear canal and illuminated her mind with perfect clarity. The deep richness of Neku's manly voice was practically nosebleed-inducing for the poor girl. Joshua ignored him – after all, he was _still_ going on about schwas and how graffiti was the soul of the city and how cool it was that people everywhere were drawing schwas on junk without any organized effort behind it and how it had sprung out of nowhere and how he had to spread the legacy blah blah blah. Since the Japanese language did not include schwa sounds, Joshua assumed that Neku had probably done something with a schwa for English class a few days ago, thought it was neat, and was now noticing it turn up everywhere.

Instead of wasting his patience with Neku's blatherings, Joshua turned his focus more to Rhyme's thoughts, splitting his consciousness so that one part was pressed to the "video feed" and the other was dangling in the slowly-sinking stream of thoughts that flowed steadily through Rhyme's head. The hole clawed at the back of his awareness, distracting him a little, but he paid it about the same amount of regard one would pay a toothpick laying in the sidewalk. This almost enabled him to read her mind as if he and she were one being. Of course, he was still fully aware of his body laying on the tree outside and the fact that he was but a tiny mind parasite, but it was still pretty sweet.

As Neku blabbed on, it became more and more apparent that nobody was talking to Rhyme. The other three were locked firmly in their stupid little discussion, but Rhyme was ignored. As if they didn't bring her along for any reason other than that they were obligated to. She slumped against the countertop, the tapping of her fingers becoming steadily more agitated and arrhythmic.

_It__'__s __taking __so __long__,_ she thought, irritation prickling against every word. Her brow furrowed slightly and she swept her eyes over her friends. _Look__, __they__'__re __just __ignoring __me__. __Again__._

_When __will __the __food __get __here__? __Maybe __eating __will __take __my __mind __off __this__._

Joshua witnessed this all thoughtfully, like a critic watching a movie he planned to review. From off in the distance he was aware of the door opening and a cheery voice calling out.

_Oh__, __great__. __Eri__'__s __here__. _Rhyme ground her finger into her temple, obviously not too fond of the other girl. She seemed to consciously ignore the entirety of Eri's being, deliberately looking as far away from her as possible and letting her words fade to background noise. This was slightly aggravating.

"Come on, throw me a bone here," Joshua grumbled, not getting a good look. While he normally didn't care for fanservice, it seemed only fair that she ogle an attractive girl to make up for that hideous paragraph of excessive Neku adulation. Rhyme seemed determined to snub all other females, though.

Eri strutted over to the party of four and took a seat – the only one available was next to Rhyme, though.

_Great_, thought Rhyme.

_Great__!_ thought Joshua, ready for his consolation paragraph.

Rhyme immediately looked away, staring at her lap and picking at her gross little fingernails for a few minutes. Josh was only barely able to see Eri through Rhyme's peripheral vision as the older girl leaned over, saying "hello" to everybody down the line, pausing only to make some goofy faces at Shiki. Rhyme was last. "Hey there! You're Beat's sister, aren'tcha?"

"...Yes, my name is Rhyme," she said, softly. To her credit, she made it sound shy rather than spiteful. "How are you?"

"How am I? HOW AM I, SHE ASKS! Well, Raimu, I'm BURNING with the fire of A THOUSAND SUNS! That's how AWESOME I feel today!" She punched the air a few times, striking down invisible warriors of the darkness with her fists. "I just saw last week's episode of Tin Pin Slammurai! GOD, IT WAS THE MOST KICKASS THING EVER, LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT IT..."

Joshua internally screamed in agony as Rhyme immediately tuned out.

It became such that Neku and Shiki were discussing the merits of tildes and umlauts as cultural symbols while Beat and Eri had a conversation about tin pin that began to edge into slightly "fresh" territories. Rhyme kind of ducked her head down, sighing slightly in embarrassment... and annoyance.

Josh could feel it throbbing in her being, a deep, itchy anger. Long bottled up, it seemed to ache for release, infesting everything she did and felt. It made her thoughts buzz slightly, prickling against his extrasensory perception; the walls of her mind crawled with it subtly, but noticeably. And then there was that hole. Joshua could have sworn it looked bigger than it had yesterday, but that was probably just his imagination.

Those chuckleheads hadn't been paying much attention to her at all, had they? Joshua mind-frowned. Most likely, it wasn't a conscious effort to exclude the shortie on their part; she was kind of out of their age group, after all.

He gently disconnected his thought-probe from her senses, turning around to examine the hole again. The fear of the unknown grabbed at his cold heart, but Josh was having none of that. He stared at the hole with trepidation – it looked almost like a window, looking over a great expanse of nothingness. The Something was indeed still down there, like a tiny black splotch amid a sea of static. No longer was it screaming; rather, it seemed to be... sobbing.

Joshua watched it for a while, his initial uneasiness fading into something like pity, if such an aberration could be pitied.

As if echoing from the other side of a dome, he heard the clink of a ramen bowl being set down before the girl. Judging from what he saw in his scanfield, Rhyme had begun to pick at it absently, but her thoughts were certainly elsewhere. Angry and frustrated, they rose from the front of her conscious like vengeful hornets. _Why __am __I __even __here__? __What__'__s __the __point__? __It__'__s __not __like __they__'__d __miss __me __if __I __left__._

_'__Lost __time __is __never __found __again__.' _She stabbed at her noodles, disregarding her hunger. _I __should __be __doing __something__... __something__..._

_Something __else__..._

At this point, Rhyme began to reach into her memory, scouring the crevices for any evidence of what she was missing. Joshua knew this because a thought-tendril of her own projected from the inside of her mind's wall, heading towards the depths of her brain – even though those depths were gone. Even though there was a hideous tear in the mental membrane of her preconscious mind, Rhyme's thought-probe proceeded, unaware, fearlessly shooting deep into the crackling static of the hole and feeling around. Like a bloated, blue-colored worm, it twitched and writhed, unable to find what it was looking for. Rhyme began to squeeze her chopsticks in her small hand, grinding her teeth. _Why __can__'__t __I__... __ugh__... _

_I __can__'__t __remember__._

Aaaand that would probably be her entry fee she was looking for. Non-refundable, of course.

Joshua felt a little sting at that, but he ignored it. With a job like his, he couldn't very well go around passing out mercy like party favors, now could he? He'd make a very ineffective judge if he was always cuddling the weaker argument. Besides, it was an easy thing to replace an entry fee.

All you had to do was fill the void with something new.

To find something else to love with all your heart in place of what was lost – it seemed simple enough to Joshua. After all, since she couldn't remember what her entry fee was in the first place, it wasn't like she was missing out on much.

He studied the tendril of thought as it squirmed around in the crackling hole, watching it seethe with building irritation. With a small sigh, he slathered another Imprint of the "Ramen" meme all over her head and hoped that would momentarily distract the girl from the loss of her most precious thing. There wasn't much more he could do here while remaining silent, and her interpersonal interactions were growing too boring for him to bother with. He had much to think about, at any rate. And so, Joshua withdrew from her mind, gently slipping out the way he came.

Once his consciousness had been safely sealed up inside his own head, Joshua got to thinking.

So... Rhyme had a hole in her head. This fact, though well-established, was still somehow difficult to swallow, if only because it was the first time Josh had ever seen or heard of such a phenomenon. Regarding the static, it reminded him uncomfortably of the Noise as they were erased, screaming, from this plane of reality.

Erasure. Rhyme's erasure and this hole were linked somehow, Joshua could feel it. _Perhaps __the __stress __of __being __erased __tore __her __mind __open__? __No__... __her __Soul __should __have __repaired __the __hole __by __now, if that were the case__._

And that still didn't explain the Something, screaming deep within that strange world of pure, unfettered static. Perhaps it was some kind of Noise? Rhyme's squirrel Noise form, even, angry at being sealed up again? Although, if that were the case, there shouldn't have been static everywhere. Humans just don't carry around seas of monochromatic noise in their heads.

And then there was her entry fee...

Her entry fee!

Subconsciously, Joshua's face lit up. Eureka. The hole was where her entry fee had used to be, close to the forefront of her mind but far enough back to not imply an unhealthy obsession. A theory spun itself out of the dusty bits of info Josh had collected. Perhaps Rhyme's Soul was still slightly scrambled from being erased, re-gathered as a Noise, and finally reincarnated as an actual human being. This would weaken it, of course – unbalance it, maybe to such a degree that her Soul was unable to repair itself? It could be that the Soul was shifting frequencies slightly every instant. Maybe it was something like a microcosmic wobbling – not shifting enough to push Rhyme into another layer of existence, but enough to make it hard for her Soul to recognize its own vibe?

If that doesn't make sense, imagine spinning around for a long time and then trying to walk in a straight line – except the relentless, chaotic pitching of the world beneath you never stops, no matter how long you sit and wait.

Now, suppose the "you" in that previous example represents your mind, and the pitching instability of the world around you represents your Soul. In other words, the mind was stumbling around and bumping into shit while the soul spun around it, like some kind of sickening teacup ride. Like... a psycho-dizziness.

If Rhyme's Soul had, indeed, become psychodizzy (as Joshua immediately dubbed it, once again displaying his flagrant lack of skill at coining not-lame terms), it was no wonder that she wasn't performing at full capacity. That explained why the hole was still there, even though weeks had passed since Rhyme had graduated to living. The hole, presumably, was the space left behind from Rhyme's entry fee.

And the static...

Joshua remembered something Mr. H had told him long ago, back when Joshua had just fallen into Reaperdom and was learning the ropes. He had asked why the Noise explode into static when they were erased.

Mr. H had laughed a little. "The Noise don't explode into static, J. That static-y stuff you see? Not real. It's only in yer head."

Joshua had whipped out a whole laundry list of reasons why that wasn't true – other people saw the static too! He wasn't delusional! Et cetera.

"No, I... hm... This is hard t'explain. When they're erased, they're obliterated, right? You erase the 'glue' that keeps their Soul together, causing the Soul to scatter and disperse. The static you see is the 'glue' turning from something to nothing. Absolute nothing, mind you. I ain't talking about 'black void' nothing. I mean the total, complete absence of _things_ altogether – no air, no color, no light, no darkness. Y'see, by its nature, nothingness is impossible to describe. The human brain simply cannot comprehend this nothing, as it has only ever had to experience Things – and so it substitutes an image of static, so that yer cute lil' sanity won't explode. It already kind of kicks the first law of thermodynamics in the shin as it is."

Presently, Joshua considered this. If static was the brain's representation of Nothing, and the hole in Rhyme's head was the hole left behind by her entry fee... then it was simple. The static was simply the absence of what should be: all of Rhyme's hopes and aspirations, dreams and desires, deleted.

The Something, however... that was probably the rest of Rhyme's subconscious. As Joshua saw it, the wound left by the deletion of Rhyme's entry fee was finite. It was impossible for Rhyme's entire subconscious mind to be composed of only future wishes. While yes, a core part of Rhyme's self had been wiped from existence totally, that was still only a small part of her mind, right? What of her memories of her life thus far? Her adages? The way people mispronounced "Rhyme"? The hokey CPR performed on the commercial? Her behavioral patterns, her emotional responses to stimuli, her friends and her family? Her ability to perceive pain? The fact that a red light means stop?

Miscellaneous things like that were stored in the subconscious mind, which functioned as something of a massive database for anything and everything ever encountered by the brain. Archived data of any sort could be instantly retrieved for future use, if you knew how to do it. This was, in fact, the basis of Joshua's Composer powers, but that isn't important right now.

The point was that the subconscious mind was massive. What was the loss of some future hopes? And anyway, this meant that the void in Rhyme's mind had to be finite, surrounded on all edges by the rest of Rhyme's personal experiences and such. Her subconscious was probably lamenting the loss of a thing of great personal importance, but Joshua was sure it could be overcome. She could always just think of something else she wanted to do with her life.

The explanation, although he had only just pulled it out of his ass, satisfied Joshua. Still... every few minutes, his foresight stabbed at him like a thousand throwing knives, beating him over the head with vague visions of dead Rhymes. It was almost as if it was angry at something, but that was ridiculous. Josh scoffed and rolled over in the tree, shivering as a twig unexpectedly phased through his ghostly elbow.

Well, at least now he had a good and plausible explanation for all this. From here, he could formulate a plan based on educated guesses. It was too bad that his theory would eventually turn out to be almost ninety-five percent totally wrong, but that is a lamentation for other times.

A frog Noise symbol drifted overhead, examining him. Joshua shooed it off like a pesky fly, too busy drafting battle strategies to pay it any mind. The Noise veered away from Joshua's hidey-hole and started to angle down towards Ramen Don's attractive beige wall, glowing a malicious scarlet.

It stopped at the edge of the building, hovering up and down with apparent excitement. Another Noise drifted down to join it.

Joshua paused his heavy-duty gambit-weaving to notice they were behaving oddly. The Noise were clearly gathering, but around nobody in particular – but ah, the Noise couldn't enter Game-registered shops. They were lusting after someone inside, clearly.

Someone like...

All of a sudden, Rhyme Bito burst through the door.

She staggered into the street, her slender arms pinwheeling and finally bracing against her quaking knees. Panting, Rhyme hunched there for a moment, bent uncomfortably and uncertainly in the middle of the sidewalk. Her hat was askew and, when she straightened up, it actually fell off her head. Rhyme didn't seem to notice – she threw a frantic glance behind her shoulder at the restaurant, tensed -

- and broke into a run.

Joshua's interest was piqued like Pikes Peak. The door of Ramen Don suddenly became clogged with no less than three teenagers trying to evacuate the premises at the same time, all shouting "Raimu! Stop!" over and over. Neku, Beat, and Shiki strained against the disgruntled door frame, glared at each other, writhed around, beat the walls with their fists. Joshua stared at them, bemused. You'd think they would have learned...

However, the three stooges and their antics had basically handed him a head-start on a silver platter. Smirking, Joshua jumped out of the tree and scooped up Rhyme's hat into his unholy clutches. Enjoying the slightly alarmed looks of the hapless Artists as the hat seemed to lift into the air of its own accord, Joshua waved an invisible wave goodbye and soared into the sky, scanning the sidewalk below for any sign of Rhyme. He was actually scanning, by the way – it'd be easier for him to find a crackling hole of nothing with his mind powers than a specific blonde on the ganguro-covered streets.

Joshua found her a few minutes later, cowering in a narrow alleyway full of trash cans. She was all alone, before you get any fantasies about Joshua swooping down from above and karate-kicking a thug in the face – although the author will not discount the possibility of such a thing occurring in later chapters. Josh eased himself to the ground, crouching out of her line of sight behind one of the aforementioned trash cans. He didn't want to scare her, appearing out of thin air. (In hindsight, jumping out from behind a trash can couldn't be any easier on the nerves.) The smell and proximity to the grubby concrete made him crinkle his nose slightly, but he managed to remain strong in the face of adversity.

Holding his breath, he tuned into the RG, the familiar warm, tingly feeling washing over him. The trash can smell hit him like a sack of bricks, even if it wasn't that bad, causing him to fall on his knees with a small "Oof!"

Rhyme jumped ten feet in the air. Not literally. "_Wh__-__Wh__-__Wh__-__Who__'__s __there__?_"

The game was up. Scowling, Joshua rolled out from his hiding spot, staggering to his feet. "Ahem." He banished the dirt from his nice shirt with an irritated sweep of his hand and glanced at the girl. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. Oh, wait.

Rhyme jabbed a shaking finger at him, eyes wide. "You!"

"Joshua," he corrected her, performing a princely bow. "We've met, haven't we?"

"Where'd you come from? What are you doing?"

"Can't the Composer go where he wants?" Joshua muttered, tossing his hair. "...Perhaps he ordered me to come here."

Rhyme stared at him for a moment longer, then recognition seemed to click in her eyes. "O-Oh... right... sorry," she murmured, her shoulders sagging. She rubbed her temple and averted her eyes, mumbling apologies.

Joshua waved them away, excruciatingly aware of the fact that he was breaking his RG-fast. "Never mind me. What's got you so riled up, hm?"

"What do you mean...?" she murmured, looking up at him with something like fear.

"I was simply passing by when I saw you run out of the ramen place as though hell itself were on your heels," Joshua drawled, presenting the soft, wadded-up fabric of Rhyme's hat to her. "Moreover, you dropped this."

Rhyme stared at the black lump for a moment, subconsciously reaching up and patting the crown of her head. The feeling of slightly-frizzy hair under her palm seemed to bring her back to her senses. "...O-Oh. Thank you," she mumbled nervously, tentatively reaching out and taking the hat.

Joshua watched her eyes flick back and forth, like rats trapped in cages. He got the strong sense that she wasn't... _right_. Something about her gave off a feeling of wrongness, of total detachment from reality. He smirked, not unkindly. "...What could cause you to run like that, I wonder? Was there a squirrel in your soup, perchance?"

Rhyme flinched at the word "squirrel," biting her lip. "Oh, I... um..."

Stuffing his hand in his pocket, Joshua made it clear that he wasn't going anywhere until he had his answer.

"Uh, well... I had a... I had a headache," Rhyme muttered lamely, staring at the wall. There was a glazed look to her eyes. "And then..."

Her pale hands tugged at the hem of her sweatshirt, which Joshua saw for the first time was soaked. The wetness seemed to remind her.

"Eri poured water on me," she spat under her breath, a faint scowl twisting her lips. It didn't suit her. "I... no, that's not right. I mean, she knocked over her drink, and..." She took a deep breath, rubbing her temple. "It was... an accident, but... but I..."

Joshua frowned, waving his hand in a circle as though to urge the words along. "But you...?"

Tears began to glisten at the corner of her eyes. "I hit her... Oh, no..." She covered her face with her hands and fell to the ground with a bump, lips quivering. "I-I hit her! I did! Oh..."

Recalling the punch she had delivered to her rhinoceros of a brother, Joshua winced slightly. "Oh, dear."

Rhyme didn't seem to hear him. "I smacked her, right across the face! Just like that! I... Why did I do that? Violence isn't the answer!" Crouching there on the ground, she started rocking back and forth, a despairing expression twisting her face. She whimpered, tears spotting her already-damp sweatshirt, and buried her head behind her knees. "Why did I _do_ that? Ohh..."

Joshua tossed a wary glance behind him, wondering if Neku and company were on their way by now. "It does seem disturbingly out of character for you."

She didn't answer him.

The girl looked so small and alone, lost within the haze of confusion that so permeated her being. Someone had to do something. The thought of her cold body laying smeared across the pavement, her Soul crushed beyond recognition, sprung to the forefront of his mind once again, leaving something of a bitter taste in his mouth. _Thank __you__, __foresight__._

He looked at her for a moment longer, and then he did something unprecedented.

He knelt by her side, reached over, and patted her firmly on the head.

Jolting away at the sudden touch, Rhyme snapped her head around to look at him, eyes wide. The cloudy look within them had vanished; she stared at him with clear surprise. "J-Joshua..."

"Hush, girl." He pressed his hand on her head again, and this time she didn't recoil, though her thin shoulders tensed. "It's fine."

"N-No, it's not!" Rhyme whimpered, digging her fingers into her calves. "Eri, she never shuts up! She's a mouth on legs! She's prolly gonna tell everyone about this, about me slapping her like a... and then..." Color tinged her cheeks as Joshua gently rubbed her crown. She sniffled. "My mom'll kill me... and... and... _wh__-__why __are __you __patting __me__...?_"

"Physical contact seems to help you get your bearings," Joshua said. The top of her head was nice and warm, a sharp contrast to his own. "Anyway, there's no need to freak out. Just apologize to Eri."

"B-But..."

Joshua laid his hand in his lap and tutted softly. "No, listen. Make up some BS story about how these fools kept pouring water on you every day at school for the past week, and so you vowed to slap the dickens out of the next joker who tried. I think she'll accept it."

"...That's a lie, though," Rhyme muttered, scooting away from Joshua. "Honesty is the best policy. ...Besides, Beat will wanna know the names of 'those fools,' so he can put them on the hit list."

Joshua shrugged, smiling a little. "Give her a reason to forgive you. It doesn't matter to _me_what reason that is, but avoiding her will only inflame the situation." He was such a hypocrite.

She was silent for a moment.

Josh got to his feet and brushed off his pants, humming softly as he did so. Then, he nudged Rhyme with his toe. "Come on, then."

Rhyme mumbled something weakly.

"Hm?"

"...What does that mean, I said."

Joshua sighed. "Get up and come with me, Rhyme."

She looked at him with alarm. "...What?"

"Are you deaf, girl? I said get up and come with me. That's not too difficult for you to understand, I hope?" He ran a hand through his hair, huffing. "You clearly don't want to face your friends right now, and that's fine. You just smacked one of them right across the face, after all."

Rhyme cringed. "E-Eri isn't my friend..."

"Be that as it may, you still need to explain yourself to her." Joshua planted a hand on his hip and rolled his eyes skyward. "As it is, you don't seem to be feeling very well. I think a short break will help you get your thoughts in order, don't you? If you don't like what you're doing, it usually helps to do... something else."

She thought about this. "I shouldn't go running off alone... Beat will have a heart attack."

"And that's why I'll be with you." Joshua smirked. "To ward off the unscrupulous types, you see."

The look Rhyme gave him at that moment made it clear just who she thought was an unscrupulous type. "Neku said... I shouldn't trust you."

"Aww, he's a spoilsport of unimaginable proportions, isn't he?" Josh snorted. She must have gone and blabbed to Nekkums about yesterday; it was either that, or poor Neku was suffering from a case of 'Have I Mentioned Joshua Is A Murderer Today?,' bless his squishy heart. "Now, we won't be gone _that_ long. An hour, at the very most. I give you my word, Rhyme, that no harm shall come to you during that time." The thought occurred to offer her some van candy, but that seemed like pushing the envelope.

She looked like she wanted to resist, but after a moment's hesitation she staggered to her feet anyway. "I... I guess that's all right," she muttered softly. "Please don't kill me, though."

"Who, me? A killer? I wouldn't hurt a _fly_, Rhyme." He couldn't help but grin wider in devilish delight, reviling in his own nastiness. Rhyme didn't seem very impressed by this.

"...Seriously," she whispered hoarsely.

He threw up his hands. "If you can't bring yourself to trust a rat like me, go right ahead. Pat me down. I'm unarmed."

She turned pink at the suggestion and fidgeted a little. "...I don't think that's... just don't kill me, okay? P-Please..."

Joshua rolled his eyes and stuffed his hands back in his pockets. "Very well. _I __won__'__t __kill __you_. Is that perfectly acceptable? Can we get going? Yes? No?"

"Well, uhm..."

At this point, Rhyme stood there for a still moment, fidgeting, lips pursed as though words were begging to spill out but still had to go through customs. You could tell that two forces were struggling inside her - Neku's probably overly-hyperbolic stories fighting with her own experiences for her trust.

Josh figured her completely unwarranted crush on Neku might be skewing the playing field, so he turned on the puppy dog eyes and commenced the batting of the eyelashes, lip a-quivering. Wibble, wibble.

Rhyme made a face. "You don't have to look at me like that, you know..."

"Oh, come on," Joshua pouted, trying to look as obnoxiously dejected as he could.

Finally, she seemed to come to a conclusion. Rhyme looked up at Joshua, her somber eyes almost bleeding with uncertainty. "I know _they_ won't like it, but... as... as long as nothing weird happens..." A small sigh. "I guess it's okay." She bit her lip. "...Let's go."

At this favorable response, Joshua's creepy eyes glittered. It was pretty fab, to be honest.

"Excellent. Shall we?"

And thus they shall'd out of the alleyway.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** ok

I have nothing to say here except

I hope Joshua will be able to make a clean, believable transition from creepy zombie kidnapper to lovesick zombie maiden in the next chapter, wherein he sweeps Rhyme off her feet and kisses her neck succulently and grossly sniffs her fruity innocence while sucking on her teeth as she groans and bucks her hips and weeps and says "j-joshua," all in some vaguely-defined kitchen somewhere as Neku watches TV next door and eats some crackers. [/_sarcasm_]

also, I am totally taking down the strawberry thing at some point

I personally hate strawberries, so having Rhyme always stink like strawberries really turns my stomach. I just... I keep picturing the IHOP strawberry carnival garbage and I kind of have to lie down after that. Open a window, take painkillers and die, you know. That whole song and dance.

but it's also a cliche and cliches get stomped on whenever I'm around (apparently)

...what, you thought this wouldn't have some parodic elements

dude

_dude_

_are you for real?_


End file.
